On 03/05/2014 16:37, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
John Williamson wrote:
One reason for making it the size it is could have been that they may
have looked forwards (As engineers often do) and foreseen that the CD
drive could replace the 5 1/4" floppy drive in a standard computer case.
People also found it a comfortable size to hold and view the "label",
and that holds true for Blu Ray even now.

That assumes they realised it would be possible to home record a CD. I
don't think this was thought possible when the system was devised. As I
said, it was a replacement for LPs.

Do you not recall the fuss made over "multimedia" when it came to the PC?

(not your true multimedia as practiced on other platforms of the time -
where the computer controlled a multitude of AV devices, but basically a
PC with CD ROM and a sound card).

Apparently "you could now run applications like interactive
encyclopaedia..." and software released on CD would be "impossible to
pirate" since they had so huge a capacity they were much bigger than
your HD, and you would need an impractical number of floppies to copy one.

The arrival of the CD writer kind of put the kibosh on those ideas (even
if the first single speed drive released was $15,000).

I remeber getting my first Toshiba 3401B CD ROM drive[1] (with caddy
load), and some PD software / "stuff" disks. It felt overwhelming having
650MB of stuff to sort through on a machine with a "large" 40MB hard drive!


[1] Just wondering how sad it is that I remember the model number 25
years later? Still it was chosen carefully so that I could share it
between platforms in an external SCSI drive enclosure (which I made from
a standalone IBM 5.25" floppy drive unit)


--
Cheers,

John.

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